With enterprise IT departments dealing with a surging sea of data, are unified storage platforms the answer. Drew Robb looks at some real world deployments.

Unified storage platforms seem to be the in thing these days. EMC, NetApp, Pillar Data Systems, Reldata, Cisco and others have brought such products to market. But how are they doing in the real world?

First State Bank & Trust in Kansas opted for a Pillar Axiom system when faced with a doubling of storage requirements over an 18-month period to a total of 3.8TB.

We saw value in the concept of unified storage to support our virtualized environment and keep pace with rapid growth, said Harry M. Wheeler, Jr., senior vice president at First State Bank & Trust. Moreover, we saw additional value in Pillars approach to unified storage, which applied Quality of Service [QoS] capabilities to ensure the highest levels of performance for our most critical applications without having to worry about resource contention. This enabled us to consolidate storage on a single platform while still having plenty of room to scale as needed.

When Wheeler first joined the bank, the primary source of information resided on a mainframe. Over the years, however, applications spun off to a network environment. File servers became the home of vital banking applications, such as check imaging, remote deposits, customer inquiries and online banking. The bank needed a plan that would enable quick restoration of servers and file data in the event of a disaster. Aside from the need to fortify its disaster recovery (DR) plan, Wheeler also wanted to virtualize 13 servers with the goal of increasing useable capacity and decreasing total cost of ownership.